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Few entertainment properties are as ubiquitous as The Walking Dead. Everyone knows about the show, most of us have seen at least a few seasons, and the absolutely immense popularity of zombies across the world owes a lot to AMC’s hit series based on Robert Kirkman’s iconic comic book series.

Today, The Walking Dead: Our World releases on iOS and Android as the latest endeavor for the brand, but this time it’s something a bit different. Our World is a location-based mobile AR game a lot like Pokemon Go that tasks players with roaming the real world, completing events, collecting items, and ultimately taking down zombies. Using your phone’s camera it can even superimpose them onto your surrounding environment quite convincingly.

Next Games is a mobile game-focused developer that’s most well-known for previously collaborating with AMC on this same property to release The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land, a tactical RPG with tens of millions of downloads. Now the studio has been tasked with capitalizing on the mobile AR-hype, primarily fueled by Pokemon Go’s and Niantic’s continued success.

Zombies Ate My Neighbors

If you’re reading this right now then there is a high chance that you have, to some degree, pondered what it would be like if there really was a zombie apocalypse. Would all those hours of Nazi Zombies in Call of Duty or your expert marksmanship in Arizona Sunshine help you at all? Does watching Zombieland and reading The Zombie Survival Handbook actually prepare you for the unthinkable?

The answer to all of those questions is almost certainly no, but if you don’t take things too seriously and think it’s fun to gamify all aspects of life, then The Walking Dead: Our World could be just for you.

Similar to Pokemon Go, The Walking Dead AR is powered by Google Maps to display a map of the real world in real-time on your phone screen. You can see your avatar as you physically walk around and explore your environment and it moves in unison based on your phone’s GPS tracking.

You have to physically go out and explore to find missions to complete and play the game itself, which involves killing lots of zombies. From what I’ve seen so far missions include basic “Encounters” in which you clear out a single screen’s worth of walkers, usually five or six, in a matter of seconds. This is the bread and butter of the game and typically rewards some basic cards.

Combat in The Walking Dead AR is simple: you tap where you want to shoot. Try and get as many headshots as possible to take down zombies more quickly, but that’s about it. Your companion will jump in and fight as well and you can even toss out grenades Pokemon Go style by flicking your finger upwards on the screen.

Other mission types include Infestations, which are multiple wave split into separate instances. When you clear the final wave, you get a big reward with a higher chance of scoring rare cards (more on that later.) Then there

From the Future’s hilarious spin on the VR shooter, Hopalong: The Badlands, is releasing on PSVR very, very soon.

The studio announced today that the game will launch on PSVR on July 17th. Hopalong isn’t like most other VR shooters; it’s a western-style shooter that sees you jump on the back of a toy horse and imitate riding it with one controller to move around the map. In the other hand you hold a gun which, well, you know what that’s for. It’s essentially taking the cowboy games you used to play as a kid and injecting them with a little VR goodness. Check out the trailer for the game below.

Not exactly your average wave shooter, right? The game’s set to include three campaigns, so hopefully, there’s plenty of content ready and waiting.

One of the most anticipated PSVR games of the year, The Persistence, is just over a week away from release, but we still haven’t seen much of one of its biggest features – co-op. This new trailer, however, tells us a little bit more.

The Persistence doesn’t have traditional four-player co-op. Instead, its multiplayer looks a little closer to something like Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes; one player puts on the VR headset while three others grab a smartphone or tablet and download a companion app called Solex. They can use this app to see a view of the player’s world, complete with points of interest like items and enemies.

It’s up to non-VR players what they then do with this information. You could choose to help; highlighting health kits, opening doors or freezing enemies. Or, if you’re in a particularly mean mood, you could instead turn off lights and even lead the bad guys right to an unsuspecting player. We’ll be very interested to learn what motivates players to act either way.

If you’re not a fan of multiplayer don’t worry; the entire game can be played on your own, and that way there’s no need to worry about unexpected surprises. The Persistence looks a little like Dead Space in VR, with players creeping around a ship overridden with zombies, using tools to defeat them. We’re really looking forward to seeing how it turns out.

Here’s a video of one of VR’s best games being played with its most promising new controllers.

Brian Lindenhof, a VR developer best known for his work on Climbey, has uploaded a video of him playing Ready at Dawn’s Oculus Rift exclusive, Lone Echo, using the Revive app. The new controllers, which were shipped out to developers earlier this month, seem to work pretty perfectly with the game, right down to replicating Oculus Touch’s limited finger tracking (but obviously not providing the full extent of Knuckles’ own finger tracking).

Lindenhof also has an older video of himself using the Knuckles with Bethesda’s Fallout 4 VR (after failed attempts to boot up Skyrim in VR). There’s a bit of tweaking at the start of both videos but, at the very least, Knuckles seems to be more than capable of imitating the controllers that have come before it.

Of course, it’s difficult to judge just how improved the experience is without seeing a game that natively supports Knuckles. Right now the only app to do that is Valve’s own demo for the controllers, set in its Portal universe.

We don’t yet know when and how Valve plans to ship Knuckles out to VR fans, nor how much they’ll cost. Hopefully with kits now in developer’s hands, though, it won’t be too much longer.

Snap did it with Snapchat already, Facebook talked about doing it with its Messenger app shortly after that, so it should come as no surprise that now the dominant social network is pushing AR ads to appear directly inside of a users’ news feed.

The feature is being rolled out slowly and selectively with a select group of advertisers such as Michael Kors, Sephora, Pottery Barn, Wayfair, and King’s Candy Crush. In the featured image above you can see an example of how you might see an ad on your news feed for a pair of sunglasses and when you tap the image your phone’s camera will immediately show you what you might look like wearing them.

“People traditionally have to go into stores to do this,” Ahmad-Taylor said at a New York City event this week, according to TechCrunch. “People still really love that experience, but they would like to try it at home” — so this “bridges the gap.”

Maybe I’m in the minority here, but I think this seems awesome. AR really has the potential to make advertising fun and not just purely intrusive, so I’m all for seeing how the technology can help marketers and advertisers innovate.

Facebook wants to prepare you for the upcoming holiday shopping by introducing AR advertisements into your news feed. Facebook is rolling out a brand-new feature that will let you to try on new clothes, check out a new accessories, or place furniture in your home, all through the power of AR. The social media giant

Following four years of development, Magic Leap announced today that it will begin shipping the Magic Leap One Creator Edition to developers this summer — a window that began on June 21, 2018 and will end on September 22, 2018. The company also confirmed that it is using an Nvidia Tegra X2 multi-core processor inside the unit’s wearable puck-shaped computer housing, LightPack.

Magic Leap’s use of the Tegra X2 means that the spatial computer’s total horsepower will be substantially ahead of the Nintendo Switch console, which uses a Tegra X1. Alan Kimball, the company’s lead of developer technology strategy, explained that the hardware includes a Parker system-on-chip consisting of two ARM A57 CPU cores that are fully available to developers, a Denver “special use case” CPU core, and a 256 CUDA-core Pascal GPU. One of the ARM cores is dedicated to feeding graphics, while another is for game and app logic; it appears that Magic Leap is reserving additional Tegra X2 cores for operating system overhead.

A 64-bit Linux-based OS called Lumin is the underlying software architecture, with a unified memory system that developers are allowed to partition as they need. The company declined to say how much memory the device will include, but suggested that no one has yet complained about limitations. It also mentioned that each of the cores has different energy consumption and performance characteristics, and developers will have the ability to choose between cores depending on their needs. Magic Leap previously promised “several hours” of battery life, depending on the apps in use.

Full OpenGL 4.5 support will be included to run PC graphics code directly; OpenGL ES 3.1 and Vulkan support are also included, though Magic Leap strongly suggests using Vulkan for optimal performance. Unity support is already running, and Unreal Engine 4 support is coming.

Developers should target between 400,000 to 800,000 triangles total — half as many per eye — at reasonable frame rates, depending on the shaders, particle effects, and physics that are being used. Unlike traditional games, though, developers won’t have to worry about rendering backgrounds, which the real world will provide, so the polygons can be used exclusively for objects and characters.

Colman Bryant, lead interaction and experience designer at Magic Leap, also demonstrated how the system can track ungloved hands without controllers for gesture input. A real room was shown with a live overlay of a virtual mesh grid, enabling a user’s pinch gestures to place objects within the space. Individual fingers and joints can apparently be tracked, as well as block, fist, and other full-hand gestures. Eye tracking and head tracking are both included as well.

Magic Leap One’s software automatically determines the actual surfaces within the room, then displays 3D digital objects that — at least in initial demos — look noticeably less realistic than the latest ARKit apps Apple has shown off. A cartoony golem demo called Dodge showed a monster popping out of a sofa and kitchen counter, throwing rocks, and pounding on the surface underneath.